Study: Women with lots of sex partners most likely to have abortion

A first of its kind demographic study of women who have abortions reveals that girls under 20 have nearly half of all abortions in the country and that virtually all -- 99 percent -- of women who've aborted used contraception during sex.

The report released Wednesday from the Marriage and Religion Research Institute, part of the Family Research Council, pulled from the authoritative National Survey of Family Growth from 2006-2010 also found that more black women than whites or Hispanics have abortions -- 28 percent for blacks to 20 percent for whites and 15 percent of Latinas.

The anti-abortion, family-focused group broke down the demographics to both better identify who gets abortions and to show that the conventional wisdom that abortion is an everyday event isn’t true: Only one in six women have had one, not the one in three promoted by abortion proponents.

Said the report, "When asked at age 45, at the end of fertility and 20 years after most abortions are procured, one in six women report having had one, not the one in three."

The study details abortion traits over 67 pages, looking at race, income, education, marriage and sexual partners. For example, 51.7 of women who have had between 25 and 49 sexual partners have had abortions. Only 6.2 percent of those who’ve had only one partner have had an abortion.

The study generally reports that abortions are more likely among the sexually active, higher educated, and those who aren’t religious.

Key findings:

— 80.9 percent of women have not had an abortion.

— 48.5 percent of women who have had abortions had it in the teens.

— Women 21 years old have the highest percentage of abortions per age group, 27 percent.

— 47.8 of the nation’s abortions are had by women living in urban areas.

— Most women who have had abortions fall in the middle income group of $25,000-$60,000.

— 56 percent of women who have had an abortion have gone to college.

— Those living in broken families are more likely than those with two biological or adoptive parents to have an abortion.

— 52 percent of those who’ve had abortion go to church rarely or never.

— Sex at a younger age leads to higher rates of abortion. Some 36 percent of women who started having sex at 12 have had abortions, 33.7 percent for those who started at 13 and 37.9 percent of those who started at 14. The abortion rate among those who started having sex at 20 and old is 6.2 percent.